By now in business, you surely know making minor corrections along the way can save a lot of effort and expense over a major change down the road. For that reason, keeping an eye on important information related to your association is very beneficial.

Here are three important areas to keep track of for your association.

• Event Attendance – Has there been a decline in attendance lately? Or hopefully a big boost? Take a look at which events are attracting lots of members. If you notice high attendance at events with a learning session, perhaps that is something you will want to integrate into more meetings.
• Prospects – Prospects are the top of your sales funnel. Knowing things such as the ratio of prospect that become members help you set goals to understand how many people you need to reach to make your yearly membership goals.
• Membership – After all that hard work it took to convert prospects to members, you surely want members to stick around for a while. 
  How long is the average member remaining within your organization?
  What about the overall membership of the association – has it grown or shrunk?

Keeping track of what is going on with your membership organization allows you to adjust your strategy to grow your association. Take some time to regularly review your organization’s data to allow for changes to your plans as needed.

TIP: Set a monthly reminder on your calendar to review association data.

New Community Features

We have recently completed testing on the new Community features and are excited to bring you this update. Starting on Monday, April 15 you will be able to opt-in to this update through the admin area of your website. We'll be updating all StarChapter sites to use this new functionality on May 15th. Please contact support if you have any questions.

The update offers many new features including:

• Support for newsletters published quarterly, monthly, weekly, or on irregular schedules
• Auto-publish and auto-archive articles and announcements
• Completely new Forum area
• Recurring calendar events
• Improved commenting on the blog and forum
• Support for catgories on the blog, forum and articles
• Email blog posts, forum posts, calendar events, articles and announcements

You've spent time carefully crafting a valuable email to send to your organization, so the last thing you want it to do is to go directly to their spam folder. The good news is there are some guidelines you can follow to decrease the odds your newsletter is marked as junk mail.

Let's look at some things that could potentially trigger your email to be labeled as spam.

Subject Line

• Don’t put your email subject in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Commonly viewed around the internet as shouting, an abundance of caps is sure to trigger a spam filter. 

• Avoid the words “free” or the recipient’s name in the subject line as well. But don’t let these rules scare you in to leaving the subject line totally blank – that’s a spam trigger as well.

Email Body

• Similar to the subject line, using terms like "free" or "guaranteed" within the email body are flags for spam filters. Don't think you're being tricky by trying to disguise words using characters (such as f*ree) - spam filters have long since caught on to that tactic.

• Balance text and images. Sharing images of events and members is a great way to make your newsletter more visually pleasing, but too many images are another spam flag. A good rule of thumb is to have at least two lines of text per image.

Settings

• Provide both text and HTML versions of your newsletter. In addition to helping you pass the spam filter, this is good practice in case the recipient is unable to read HTML email.

• Avoid attaching a large file in a format other than PDF or image (JPG, GIF, and PNG). If you have a big file to share with everyone, consider hosting it on your server and providing a link for the recipients to download the file.

Newsletters and emails to your members and prospective members are great ways to keep them informed about your association. By following these guidelines, your messages are more likely to end up in their Inbox. 

With the increased daylight and warmth spring brings, you will want to spend more time checking out prospective golf courses for that summer outing, rather than managing the details of the event.

Because your membership data is fully integrated with your events, your planning is simple.

StarChapter provides you with the ability to:

• Create event registration with multiple pricing options and discounts

• Accept online payments for events

• Get detailed transactional and analytical reports about the event

Visit our Event Registration page for more detailed information.

When planning your membership organization meetings, there will be many predictable elements, such as introducing new members or taking votes on issues. However, you will need to come up with exciting and beneficial meeting content to fill up your agendas if you want members to attend religiously.

Hosting speakers to share information, instruct and entertain members is great way to add value to your chapter organization meetings.

So, where do you find compelling and relevant speakers? Here are some ideas.

Members from Your Chapter

Some great speakers may be right under your nose! Chapter members are typically knowledgeable about industry topics; why not invite them to share their expertise with other members?

In addition, it will give the member a chance to practice their public speaking skills, and it will allow others to get to know the speaking member more in depth.

Here are some possible topics members can present:

• A relevant technical skill, such as new software
• Facts about an industry news story, plus how it will impact members
• A “book report” about a pertinent topic

Members of the Community

Members of the community are often more than willing to come to your meeting if they can share a bit about their business. For instance, small business owners may want to talk about their services, or a volunteer organization many want to share their cause.

When inviting community members to speak, provide a time limit, tell them about any available technology (ex. If you have a projector), and set presentation content expectations. Be sure they are able to make their presentation relevant to the membership.

Here are some ideas for whom to invite from your community:

• Lawyers discussing law relevant to your industry
• Tax or financial experts
• Business coaches
• For additional ideas, review a list of members of your local Chamber of Commerce

National Speakers Association

The National Speakers Association website (nsaspeaker.org) allows you to search for speakers based on topic and location. You will be able to come up with a list of potential speakers according to their topic of expertise or their industry.

Some of the speakers even provide videos of previous talks so you can get a sense of their style.

Ask Your Members

If you’ve exhausted these resources (or even if you haven’t), try asking members for their input. Conduct a survey using your membership management software to find out potential topics for presentations. In addition, some members may have connections willing to talk with your organization.

Having engaging speakers at your association meetings will help attract new members and keep existing members interested.